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Economics

In business, plenty of things are subjective: culture, leadership, innovation. A good culture to you might be a bad one to me. A capable leader to you might be an asshole to me. An innovative solution to you might be an incremental tweak to me. But the stuff that really matters…that stuff is objective, right?Read More

On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve announced the third interest rate hike since the onset of the global financial crisis. The message is that the U.S. economy is healthy. Yes, GDP growth is less than ideal. (Real GDP expanded by 1.9% in 2016.) But job growth is strong. The unemployment rate is low, by historical standards.Read More

Valentine’s Day is a somewhat despised “holiday”. It’s built around excess. It’s a manufactured, fleeting celebration of a profound emotion we spend our whole lives exploring. But Valentine’s Day is great in at least one way. It shows why capitalism works so well. I’m thinking specifically of the flower tent outside of my grocery store. With increasedRead More

I listened to an episode of the McKinsey podcast yesterday about China’s One Belt, One Road initiative. What is One Belt, One Road (OBOR)? A combination of land- and water-based trade passages that will help Chinese companies find foreign customers. It’s a modernized version of the Silk Road of antiquity. OBOR as an important relicRead More

LendingClub is a peer to peer loan broker. In other words, LendingClub helps connect people who need loans (borrowers) with people willing to offer loans (investors). LendingClub’s CEO, Renaud Laplanche, resigned last week under pressure. Bloomberg published an article on Thursday with some of the details. In short, Laplanche was an investor in a hedgeRead More

John Kay is a famous British economist. He posts new, short articles weekly on his website. The articles are for a lay audience, and they’re consistently good reads. I recommend checking them out. Only yesterday did I see a post of his from a couple of weeks ago, titled “Investment opportunities abound but we mustRead More

I too often take Google down the rabbit hole. On one of my recent such trips, I came across the seminal 1945 paper by F.A. Hayek titled “The Use of Knowledge in Society”. F.A. Hayek was a world-renowned economist. He shared the 1974 Nobel prize in economics. According to Hayek’s Wikipedia page, In 2011, hisRead More